It was haying and harvesting time in Norway when he courted Barbo Stengrimson, the girl he married. She was four years younger and lived to be 80 in 1906. He rented a plot of ground from a large landowner named Berg (from which my father took his name).

Grandfather had to work hard clearing the ground, which was very stony and all winter hauling home wood for his own, and also to pay rent. The crop was mostly barley, which they dried and ground up for flour to make a kind of flat bread they stored away in an outhouse called "stabour" (Norwegian for barn) where it would keep for months. Then, of course, they had fish they could catch or buy.

Also they had a herd of goats for milk, clothes and meat. My father when he was nine years old, herded the flock way up in the mountainsides, sometimes when feed was scarce--going barefoot, as money was scarce for shoes, even in cold weather.

Their location was near a small hamlet called Got, in the Valley of Hallingdall, about sixty miles inland from the Seaport of Bergen. The valley had high, rough mountains on both sides where snow stayed for months.

When Dad was fifteen, Grandfather left Norway for America, Dad seventeen; then he left too, and came to Lansing, Iowa, in the USA, where the others had already landed, with Grandmother and family of staying behind in Norway to earn his own passage fare, until he was four boys; two boys were born in Iowa, they had seven in all.

Leaving Bergen by sailship, it took six weeks to cross the Atlantic to Montreal. Our Dad being used to the high mountains, spent his pastime sometimes climbing the high masts on the ship to the very top, some of which were a hundred and sixty five feet while the sailors look on admiring his courage.

One time in Norway he thought he would learn to swim by tying a rope around his neck and onto a log which kept his head down instead and nearly drowned him.

Near Lansing Grandfather brought 40 acres of land for $300.00 and built a house. But farming wheat was a failure when the "chance bug" they called it ruined the crops every year, so Grandfather pulled stakes and with his furniture and family in a light wagon pulled by a yoke of oxen, headed for North Dakota, at Walcott where they had acquaintances, they took a homestead about six miles out, herding a small flock of cattle all the way from Lansing.

By this time, my father, Engebret Berg was married and had two children, Henry and Mary. 5o he also moved and homesteaded near Colfax, six miles from Grandpa. Here, in 1880, October 10th, I was born in a sod shack on the wild, endless prairies. Dad was now 31 years old--had a long black beard as he walked alongside, prodding the oxen by turns with Grandpa. He died in 1933, Age 84.

by Martin J. Berg

According to early custom in Norway the parents first name had a "son" added to it, so Grandpa's boys called themselves Helgeson, except my father and Uncle Carl, who took the name of Berg. Henry says there was a caravan of settlers moving same time with Grandpa. They went together for safety, because of the Indian scare; they had been on the warpath some years before at Abercrombie, N. Dakota, through which the caravan passed.